Consider the story—this really happened, she’s a nurse—in which a mom-to-be found out very early in the pregnancy that her unborn child had a disease that wasn’t compatible with life; bore the child to term anyway; then donated all of his organs to other newborns; and keeps in touch with those kids to this day, godmother to an extended family. That’s real life; you might read about it in some uplifting church circular, or Reader’s Digest or something, but you won’t find anything like that in well-crafted ‘literary’ fiction.On sentimentality and literary fiction.